Shangri La
by Azaz the Unabridged
Summary: SEED-Fafner crossover. "Soushi knows that this isn’t Kazuki, he can’t calm this boy just by being there, but he can’t help but notice that every one of this boy’s gestures are also Kazuki’s gestures." (Soushi Minashiro x Shinn Asuka.)


AN: Characters don't belong to me. Spoilers for the last ep of Fafner and, uh, the first of SEED Destiny. Soushi/Shinn, implied Soushi/Kazuki. Yes, Meer is in the first bit…

**Shangri-La.**

"'We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we've got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different worlds, and then we'll build…'

'And then what?' said her daemon sleepily. 'Build what?'

'The Republic of Heaven,' said Lyra."

- _The Amber Spyglass._

_**one.**_

When he awakes, there is noise. There are screaming people; there is a bustle of rickety carts.

"Toomi-sensei?" he calls weakly, and then, only a touch stronger, because this body is young and new and frail, "Kazuki?"

There is an answering flurry of movement outside the curtains and a girl stumbles in, pink-haired and smiling. "I'm so sorry," she says, "we thought the drugs would keep you asleep a little bit longer, we didn't have anyone here when you woke up because, well, we didn't think you were going to wake up. We're sorry, we really are, but we've had to schedule everyone very tightly because there are such an awful lot of refugees and everyone's been busy trying to sort them out so there's very few of us left to work at the clinic—"

"Where am I?"

She beams. "Shangri-La."

_**two.**_

"Name?" the census taker asks.

"Soushi Minashiro."

"From Onogoro, right?"

"Yes."

"You the only one?"

"Yes."

"No family?"

"No."

"They dead?"

"Yes." He can't be sure what had happened to Tsubaki, but both of his parents are. And it's true enough. None of them are alive _here_.

They think that he's from their Earth, that he is harmless, so after their questions they allow him wander their temple to the stars. They are in a war, they tell him, but even so, there are still people wandering the streets with children and shopping bags and sometimes even cheerful faces. There are no hidden weapons systems, though, no giants sleeping beneath the surface, but if these people are not really at war, they are living in the shadow of it, and it shows on every street-corner and every face.

Shangri-La, they call it. Paradise.

For Soushi, it is hell.

_**three.**_

Soushi sees him on the third day, sitting dazedly under a tree, staring out into another world. "Kazuki!" he shouts, but the boy just stares, lifeless as a puppet whose strings have been sliced away. "Kazuki!"

The boy turns his head slowly – not responding to the name, just following the sound of a voice. His eyes are red and burning, which shakes Soushi back to reality (_this_ reality, painful as it is) with a jolt. _Assimilation phenomenon_, he thinks first, then realizes that no, this isn't and can't be Kazuki. This is not his world, and this is not his Kazuki.

"Sorry," mutters Soushi. "I thought you were someone else."

His eyebrows arch, the gesture painfully familiar. "Someone dead?"

"Someone lost."

"Oh," says the boy. "That's not so bad, you know. You can always _find_ them again."

_Perhaps_, thinks Soushi, _but then they'll stare at you without recognizing you, and not care that you've missed them horribly, and they'll be just as good as dead._ "Maybe." Part of him wants to walk away, embarrassed and lonely, but he has found something familiar here, and he's not ready to let it go. Slowly, almost warily, he sits down on the grass beside not-Kazuki, as though afraid that the boy will run away on him, and searches for an excuse to say something, to stay. "Do you… live here?"

"For now," he says, tonelessly.

"Are you from Orb?"

"Not anymore." His brows furrow and his lips tighten into a scowl. "My family died there. I'm not going back." His fingers clench the fabric of his coat so fiercely that his knuckles whiten.

Soushi knows that this isn't Kazuki, he can't calm this boy just by being there, but he can't help but notice that every one of this boy's gestures are also Kazuki's gestures. He may not know this boy, but he has – or is it had? – known Kazuki all his life, and he knows how to calm Kazuki, to reassure Kazuki. "What are you going to do now?" he asks quietly. Talking has always helped Kazuki. (Not to mention that talking to Kazuki has always been calming to Soushi—)

"I don't know."

_You're angry_, Soushi considers saying, but that's obvious enough, so he jumps a step ahead in the conversation, a jump forward along the path Kazuki would have taken. "You could fight," he says. It's what Kazuki did, when Soushi disappeared.

The boy lifts his hands up to the sun (which isn't really a sun at all, Soushi reminds himself just another patch of light in the sky) in a weary cross of helplessness and quiet rage. "With what?" he asks.

Soushi frowns. "Something," he says. "Anything. They say that the military's always recruiting."

"ZAFT?"

"So long as there's a war, the military will need _someone_ to fight." And there will always be war, no matter when or where Soushi goes.

The boy mulls this over, and Soushi leaves him to think, because that's what Kazuki would have wanted. "Who are you?" he asks finally. "A recruiter?"

"No," says Soushi.

"Another refugee?"

He thinks it over for a moment. "I suppose."

_**four.**_

Soushi leaves as soon as the bustling nurses will allow it, tracing his path back to the quiet park where the boy who's so like Kazuki is waiting. "You came back," he notes.

"Yes," says Soushi. _Because you're here._

They sit there for a while, maybe a few minutes, maybe an hour, and though they're adrift in space Soushi feels at home, staring out at the ocean with Kazuki (and it doesn't matter that there's no ocean at all, or that they're staring at the ebb and flow of _people_ rather than salt-water tides, because it's not the _ocean_ that's important, it's _Kazuki_). And from time to time, Soushi's eyes wander away from the view to the boy beside him (and that's natural, too, that's perfectly normal), taking note of the puffy eyes and hunched shoulders and the desperate, quiet ball the boy has curled himself into, shutting out the world.

"You should go for a walk," says Soushi, speaking from years of parallel experience, "or something. It'll make you feel better."

The boy turns and regards him suspiciously, wary and almost feral (the same look, Soushi thinks, Kazuki wore when Soushi dragged him from the shelters to Fafner's hanger, a look strong and demanding and painfully aggrieved). "How would you know?" he asks. "You don't even know who I am."

Soushi shrugs and clambers to his feet, holding out a hand to the boy. "I knew someone like you, once," he says. _I know you better than you know yourself, from the Siegfried System and endless reports and years spent together. Would you like me to tell you about how we got lost when your mother vanished, wandering the hills of Tatsumiya Island until you too tired to even cry? Would you like me to tell you how you traveled to the ends of the earth when I disappeared?_ Slowly, the boy extends his hand, and Soushi pulls him to his feet. "I'm Soushi Minashiro."

"Shinn Asuka," he says.

And so they walk.

_**five.**_

"Tell me," says Shinn, "about the person you knew." And Soushi knows, as well as he ever did with Kazuki, just what the boy wants him to tell him about, but he doesn't know quite what to say.

"We grew up together," he begins. There's an awful lot he has to gloss over, and it's impossible to really tell the story without it all. He can't say _He tore my eye out after I tried to assimilate him_, for instance, because that would hardly make sense to Shinn. Nor can he explain Fafner or fighting Festums or crossing through the Siegfried System, and it seems hardly worth it, upon reflection, to go through all the years of friendship, because there's nothing particularly _extraordinary_ about those, either. "And we fought together, when the war broke out." This, of course, says next to nothing about them, but it's the closest the can get to explaining in terms of _this_ world. And that's all he has. Two sentences for all those years.

_**six.**_

"If you know so much about me," he says, "then tell me what to do."

"Two days ago," says Soushi, "you didn't believe that I could know anything about you."

"And three days ago," he says levelly, "you told me I should fight."

Soushi's stomach sinks. Shinn's going to go somewhere and maybe fight and maybe die and he's going to lose Kazuki again. "And I don't know anything," he says, evasively.

"But you do," insists Shinn. "I don't know how, but you do, and you're the only one who does, now that mother and father and Mayu and everyone are dead." Soushi just stares at him, so he fumbles on ahead. "And that's why I've been coming back, all this time – because somehow you understand everything even though I don't even _know_ you and—"

"And?"

"And I don't know," he says hoarsely, staring down at his hands, "but you do, don't you?"

Soushi grips Shinn's shoulders and forces him to look up (just like Kazuki, just like the first time Kazuki piloted, and Kazuki was hesitant and _god_, if only this was Kazuki). "What would you fight for?" he asks.

"ZAFT," he says, "of course."

"_Why_?"

"To protect this place," he says, "or any place. If there's never going to be peace, then the least I can do is fight to protect the places I love."

"And what place would that be?" asks Soushi. "The ashes of Onogoro? This?"

"Of course this," says Shinn. "It's where you are." Soushi's hands drop to his sides, his face incredulous. "What? _You're_ the only one who seems to understand, and I don't care _how_, so long as you do, and—"

"You're just like him," he says. "I thought I'd never find him again, but you're just like him."

Shinn smiles slightly, Kazuki's familiar, quiet smile, and leans lightly against Soushi, head resting gently on Soushi's shoulder. "I told you," he said, "you can always find the people that you've _lost_."

_And if I can find Kazuki in another world, then if I let him go, I can find him again. I can always find him again._ "Fight," he says, as confidently as though he were back in the Siegfried System (there is no audio-visual connection, of course but touch has always been better than wires and electrodes anyway, and Shinn's body pressed against his own is warm and familiar and beautiful), and this was just another set of directions to relay. "If you have something to protect, then fight for it."

_**seven.**_

"I'm leaving," he says.

"I know."

"You would, wouldn't you?" Shinn sits down next to him, the quiet whisper of a man-tamed wind toying with his hair. "I don't think I'll be back soon."

"I know."

"You could come with me. You should come with me."

Soushi shakes his head slightly. "I told you, I'm not a soldier."

"ZAFT doesn't just need soldiers. There'll be something for you to do."

"No," he says. "I have somewhere I need to go." He has already started thinking about it, letting himself out into non-existence and back into existence, casting himself out into the void and hoping against hope that he can reel himself back in to home.

"You're looking for _him_."

"Yes."

Shinn shifts, his pose suggesting hurt or maybe anger, but that fades in a moment and settles to a sort of forlorn sadness. "I wish you'd stay," he says quietly.

"You'll be fine," Soushi reassures.

"How do you know?" he asks petulantly.

"I knew someone like you, once," he says. "And I know you."

_**and time goes by.**_

Shinn Asuka doesn't return to Shangri-La for a long, long time. It is different when he does, of course. Time has passed and the colony is no longer filled to the bursting point with refugees from Orb and the shadow of war has been lifted once again.

And there is no Soushi.

"Minashiro? We had a refugee by that name, once," frowns a clerk, pulling up the files of the first war. "But his name doesn't show up at all after that – no, I don't know where he could be. I'm sorry, I don't know what could have happened – there isn't any record of off-colony travel or anything."

"There's no record of death, though?"

"No, sir – I'm afraid that's all I can tell you, though."

"No, that's alright," says Shinn. He hadn't expected the boy to be here anymore, not really, not if he was still searching for someone. So Shinn traces his way back along the familiar streets to the shuttle that will bring him to Earth, where he will continue searching, and, if he is lucky, find Soushi again.

Because, as long as it takes, one can always find the people one's lost.

_**fin.**_


End file.
